The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

was disappointed when he realized the famous director wasn’t calling to offer him a part.) LeRoy reported back to Nancy that SAG would stand behind her. By then, however, she had decided nothing short of a face-to-face with the union president would settle her nerves. At least, that’s what she told LeRoy. In truth, “I had seen some of his pictures, and, on-screen, at least, he seemed nice and good-looking—someone I wanted to meet,” Nancy would admit later.

Ronnie called and suggested dinner that night. It would have to be a quick one. He claimed to have an early call at the studio the next morning. Nancy recognized that as a standard white lie employed by Hollywood people. It was a bail-out option against the possibility that a blind date would turn out to be a dud. So, her pride a little bruised, Nancy fibbed that she had an early call too.

She opened the door of her apartment two hours later to a man who in the flesh was every bit as handsome as she had seen on-screen—even though he was leaning on two canes. During a charity baseball game, Ronnie had broken his right thighbone in a half dozen places. He had just been released from the hospital after having spent nearly two months in traction. For his part, Ronnie had expected a typically flashy MGM starlet. He saw instead “a small, slender young lady with dark hair and a wide-spaced pair of hazel eyes that looked right at you and made you look back.”

They headed to trendy LaRue’s on the Sunset Strip. Ronnie told Nancy there was a simple solution to her problem. “Have the studio change your name,” he said. “You would hardly be the first.” Naturally, he couldn’t have known how much it meant to her to be called Nancy Davis, or the years she had waited, or the effort she had put into earning the validation that came with that identity. There could be only one reason she would ever change it—and it wasn’t her career. She replied firmly: “Nancy Davis is my name.”

Before long, the pretexts of having to be home early for sunrise calls were forgotten. Nancy was entranced by Ronnie’s lack of movie-star ego and his seemingly bottomless inventory of amusing stories. As for him: “I had discovered her laugh and spent most of my time trying to say something funny. A lot of George Burns and Georgie Jessel material got an airing that night, and not always with credit given.” He was fascinated to learn that she was the daughter of a brilliant surgeon and had grown up in a household where movie legends like Spencer Tracy and Walter Huston were practically family. Ronnie also discovered she had never seen the ribald entertainer Sophie Tucker, known as the “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” who was opening at Ciro’s nightclub a block away. They went for the first show and stayed for the second one. Despite his bum leg, Ronnie gamely tried some steps on the dance floor with Nancy. They had a late snack afterward with Tucker herself, and it was three thirty before they called it a night. “I don’t know if it was love at first sight, but it was something close to it,” Nancy recalled.

So goes the opening scene of the script for their love story. It appeared that fate’s hand was at work, bringing together by seeming happenstance two people who were perfect for each other. But, in fact, Nancy had been looking for a way to catch Ronnie’s eye, though he apparently was oblivious. Jill Schary Robinson, the daughter of MGM production head Dore Schary, claims that her mother had invited both Nancy and Ronnie to a dinner party some weeks before their supposedly blind date. Jill was only a teenager, but she knew that something was up with Nancy, relating to me, “Even I could see she was dazzled by Mr. Reagan.” Her mother, Miriam Schary, told author Anne Edwards she had arranged the evening specifically because Nancy wanted an opportunity to meet Ronnie. He, alas, “was obviously preoccupied and there were ten for dinner that night. I don’t recall his saying much to Nancy.”

Lynne Wasserman, daughter of Ronnie’s agent Lew Wasserman, told me that she has seen a photo of the future first couple at an even earlier social gathering held right after Nancy arrived in Los Angeles in 1949. It was a big celebration that the elder Wasserman and Anita May, whose husband’s family owned a leading department store chain, held every year on March 15 to celebrate their birthdays. Lynne Wasserman says she is sure of her facts on this one: “Ronnie and Nancy met at Tom and Anita May’s.” Nancy was also looking for other avenues that might bring the two of them together. How else to explain the fact that an actress newly arrived in Hollywood had already put in an application to run for a seat on the Screen Actors Guild board?

However their paths finally crossed, it seems safe to stipulate that Nancy set her sights on Ronnie early and that she was not going to let him slip past her. Nancy, after all, had declared upon her arrival at MGM that her major goal in life was to find a husband. She even showed friends at the studio a list she had compiled of Hollywood’s most “eligible bachelors.” Ronnie’s name was at the top. “Subtlety has never been Nancy’s forte,” biographer Edmund Morris wrote, “but the fact remains that when Dutch rang the bell of her apartment that November night, leaning heavily on two canes, the door opened on a future beyond their combined powers of belief.”

After their first date, Nancy and Ronnie had dinner again the next night, and the night after that, and the one after that. “For the first month or so we must have gone to every restaurant and nightclub in Los Angeles,” Nancy wrote. But the rush of early romance stalled and